Digital Media Cometition

Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory.  Now that’s a mouthful.  I know they’ve passed through my radar, but rereading their description, I don’t know why they are not one of my regular stops.

A consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, and engineers, of leading researchers and nonprofit research institutions, HASTAC (“Haystack”) is committed to new forms of collaboration across communities and disciplines fostered by creative uses of technology. Our primary members are universities, supercomputing centers, grid and teragrid associations, humanities institutes, museums, libraries, and other civic institutions. Since 2003, we have been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums, and other digital projects.

Supported by the MacArthur Foundation, HASTAC has just announced the second Digital Media and Learning Competition.  This years projects, all focusing on participatory learning, will run in two themes:

• Innovation in Participatory Learning, and
• Young Innovators.

I’m especially intrigued by the Young Innovators theme.

Young Innovator awards are targeted specifically to innovators aged 18-25. These awards will support smaller-scale, forward-thinking, conceptually exciting and original participatory learning projects.

The aim of this category is to encourage young innovators to think boldly about ?what comes next? in participatory learning and to contribute to making it happen. These awards are designed to support young innovators in bringing their most visionary ideas from the ?garage? stage to implementation.

I feel like we are missing some opportunities in that we are not leveraging the young teachers who are just coming into the profession.  Many of them have extensive experience with participatory technologies.  Yet the connection between those experiences and teaching and learning are apparently not automatic.

I would love to see schools or universities support young teachers in designing and building new collaborative applications — and this competition may be one way of doing that.